Abstract
Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations is an interdisciplinary study on the nature of the Arab–Jewish conflict. It is based on observation of the interaction between speech and bodily expression. The analysis draws on audiovisual recordings of a group of Israeli and Arab students at an Israeli university as they engaged in a year-long discussion group centred on the conflict between the two ethnic groups. Waisman explores the emotional and conceptual relationships that reveal themselves through verbal and nonverbal means as they intertwine in conflict talk.
The book is organized into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the research via the author’s personal connection to the conflict as a descendant of Jewish immigrants. Waisman highlights her ethnic and cultural background throughout the book as a variable in shaping her interpretations. Chapter 2 provides a literature survey that encompasses a variety of fields such as semiotic theories, the embodied nature of interaction, dance therapy and research on conflict – Arab–Jewish conflict in particular. Here the author focuses on the relationship between the body, self and society and provides a review of studies on ‘nonverbal communication’ and the issue of the verbal–nonverbal dichotomy. The word systems approach is also introduced and explained as a text analysis tool that allows for the discovery of connections between and within texts (p. 21). Chapter 3 focuses on the preliminary data analysis and the identification of gesture–speech mismatches as crucial features of conflict talk. Chapters 4–7 present the data analysis and the discussion of the embodied expression of the various word systems.
The analysis centres around three interconnected word systems: the beten (the belly), the medina-adama (state-land), and the Shoa-Nakba (the Holocaust-the catastrophe). Waisman identifies them as indicative of the contrast between the ways in which the Jewish and Arab discussion participants conceptualize their perceptions, beliefs and emotional positions. They are illustrated by examples that aim at revealing patterns in the text, followed by the identification of gestural mismatches and various gestural patterns that surround these word systems. The majority of the mismatches relate to pointing gestures, and primarily to the disparity between personal pronouns and the direction of pointing (e.g. ‘you’ with a hand pointing at oneself). In her analysis, Waisman draws on the assumption of the communicative value of gesture and its close relationship with thought (e.g. McNeill, 1992). This perspective is maintained throughout the analysis of the word systems in which various body parts are considered as potential sites for interpreting and expressing emotion, as well as constructing both social and individual identity (e.g. focus on gestural expression of beten and gender in Chapter 4).
The Shoa-Nakba emerges as the most emotionally charged word system presented in the book. Both subsystems refer to the social memory of extreme violence and oppression – the Holocaust and the disintegration of Palestinian society in the 1948 war. The dense use of the Shoa in one particular meeting forms the core of Chapter 6. Here the analysis of mismatches within the context of political and personal genres explores the participants’ problems with identifying themselves with the other group’s suffering. The central point is the attempted equation between the Shoa and the Nakba – two violent events of the past – negotiated by the speakers. Waisman proposes that this process is identifiable via gestural mismatches that situate the concepts, places and events within the participants (e.g. pointing at oneself and uttering ‘they’ or ‘there’ while talking about the Shoa/Nakba atrocities).
Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations makes a valuable read for several reasons. To the best of my knowledge, Waisman’s book is the first study that takes the word systems approach to Jewish–Arab conflict. Although she does not explicitly use the term, it is also among the very few publications that incorporate a multimodal perspective to conflict situations in general. It also offers a rare insight into a more personal and emotional dimension of an ethnic, religious and political conflict usually accessed via mass media. The detection of the gesture–speech mismatches is in itself fascinating and evidence of fine-grained analysis – mismatches are not easy to uncover as they require very detailed and repetitive observation. Plenty of data presented with multiple examples of mismatches also seem to warrant the author’s choice to give these features prominence. Unfortunately, this promising choice is not matched by the manner in which the data is presented. Waisman uses the word ‘modality’, yet there is no reference to multimodal analysis, and there are no images to support the data. The decision not to include them might have been driven by ethical considerations. However, one might reasonably have expected some discussion of such a decision; and given that there are currently several well-developed multimodal methodologies and transcription conventions (e.g. McNeill, 1992), this is a surprising and somewhat disappointing choice. There is plenty of description of the mismatches and the surrounding interaction but the images could support the interpretations provided and at the same time present evidence of the author’s claims. Indeed, some of Waisman’s assumptions and interpretations appear rather far-fetched (e.g. assuming knowledge of a participant’s subconscious on p. 166).
Nevertheless, the book is accessible for a variety of audiences, including discourse analysts, psychologists and readers interested in conflict interactions and gesture. What also makes this publication meaningful is that the results point to the fear and mistrust that create barriers between the young Jewish and Arab people, preventing them from understanding each other. In reality, this often leads to violence. Indeed, only a few months after Waisman completed her data collection, the second intifada (the violent Arab uprising against the Israeli state) began.